Amid China’s celebration of its young, victorious Olympians, the country has paid special attention to the performance of a 50-year-old Canadian who crashed out of the second round of the fencing competition. Why is Luan Jujie such a hit? For what she did more than …
Just for the record, we have a number of talented colleagues covering the Games in Beijing. You can see their stories here, including this piece by Hannah Beech on the emotional triumph of the Chinese gymnastics team today. They’ll be contributing occasional posts from the games to this blog too. The Chinese gymnastics team were …
The spectacular Olympic opening ceremony that director Zhang Yimou pulled off last week appears to have relied on a few elements of visual chicanery. First it emerged that some televised images of 29 firework footprints that traveled up Beijing’s north-south axis through Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City to the Olympic Village …
One of the more interesting memes to emerge from the press conference after tonight’ s USA-China basketball game was this: two questioners, one Chinese and one guy who sounded European, asked US coach Mike Krzyzewski whether his team wasn’t rubbing it in a little by dunking so often and with so much flair. Even as the question was …
For the record, seeing as how I have been somewhat obsessively cataloging this, the wind blew overnight and the haze dispersed. Skies are bluish and the API around 60, which is ok, especially for Beijing. Let the Games begin! And the clean air continue.
Beijing became strangely quiet this afternoon. Businesses shut down early and workers left to find their viewing spots for the Olympic opening ceremony. The streets, on which the authorities had struggled since July to reduce traffic, were finally almost empty. If they had …
Like any other major city in China, Hong Kong has dutifully supported and contributed to the Beijing Games, and nationalist sentiment has not been wanting. We’ve been screening the immigration lines for dodgy looking Tibetans and their grad school Western friends (sorry fellas, but you can’t rock an orange t-shirt with skin that …
Only one day before the opening ceremonies and we are aswim in a murky soup of grey mist so familiar to Beijingers. It’s definitely not just the weather either. After breaching 100, the API has been stuck mysteriously just below the 100 line (see here for our previous examination of the strange stickiness of the API index at that level …
Below is a brief video of the site of the Aug. 4 attack on Chinese border police in the city of Kashgar in China’s western Xinjiang region. The clip starts at the border police station, then about 150m up the road you see a hotel with reflective windows and a tarp-covered entryway. That hotel, the Yijin, is where Chinese authorities say …
Bad news for Beijing and arriving athletes. The haze is back. The Air Pollution Index is now in its second day around the 100 mark, above which is considered unhealthy. I’d bet that the responsible departments as we say in China are having some pretty agitated meetings about whether or not (or when, actually) to implement Plan B, which …
As we and many others have written, the bright light of Olympic publicity draws groups to it like moths to the proverbial flame, so the below isn’t surprising. The number of deaths is though. Presumably these are the guys training with Al Qaeda linked groups across the border in Pakistan we wrote about earlier. Hard to judge how much of …
